What do you think?
Rate this book
Why Agree? Why Move?: Unifying Agreement-Based and Discourse-Configurational Languages
An unusual property of human language is the existence of movement operations. Modern syntactic theory from its inception has dealt with the puzzle of why movement should occur. In this monograph, Shigeru Miyagawa combines this question with another, that of the occurrence of agreement systems. Using data from a wide range of languages, he argues that movement and agreement work in tandem to achieve a specific to imbue natural language with enormous expressive power. Without movement and agreement, he contends, human language would be merely a shadow of itself, with severe limitation on what can be expressed. Miyagawa investigates a variety of languages, including English, Japanese, Bantu languages, Romance languages, Finnish, and Chinese. He finds that every language manifests some kind of agreement, some in the form of the familiar person/number/gender system and others in the form of what Katalin É. Kiss calls "discourse configurational" features such as topic and focus. A key proposal of his argument is that the computational system in syntax deals with the wide range of agreement types uniformly--as if there were just one system--and an integral part of this computation turns out to be movement. Why Agree? Why Move? is unique in proposing a unified system for movement and agreement across language groups that are vastly diverse--Bantu languages, East Asian languages, Indo-European languages, and others.
- GenresLinguistics
182 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 6, 2022
Why Bother?
Miyagawa’s Why Agree? Why Move? delves into some syntactic territory only recently explored by the topographical scions of minimalism. In fact, Miyagawa goes beyond the ‘narrow syntax’ dogmatism of Saint Noam and writes about syntax as something other than an autonomous system which is free from contamination by extra-grammatical content or context. By doing so, Miyagawa impressively puts Focus in focus and makes Topic a topic, exploring informational motivations for agreement and movement phenomena found in the syntax of every language. Wildly innovative yet formally constrained, Miyagawa breaks down the artificial barriers which segregate autonomous syntax from the critically important pragmatic, cognitive, and typological modes of linguistic explanation. By expanding minimalism in this still constrained way, that is by expanding minimalism minimally, Miyagawa claims to find the reasons why speakers and their sentences behave in the ways that they frequently do. Why Agree? Why Move? is still a highly syntactocentric exposition, despite Miyagawa’s taking into consideration information factors influencing grammatical behavior (topic/comment, (in)definiteness, focus, clause typing, etc.). These pragmatically induced grammatical behaviors are frequently bracketed off from mainstream syntax as annoyingly mysterious if not downright irrelevant to the discussion. But Miyagawa bravely and honestly looks closely at information structure, finding the topic/focus feature to be manifest in all languages, whether a language has rich agreement like Latin or seemingly no agreement like Mandarin.
As a quick example of information structure in action, consider content questions, which are marked in English syntax by moving a WH word to the beginning of the clause. While not all languages front question words (Mandarin doesn’t), it is nevertheless clear that such movement is motivated by the tendency for focused elements to occur near the beginning of a clause. Miyagawa’s analyses seem to justify his claim that this fronting, together with other pragmatically inspired movements, can add ‘expressiveness’ to any expression. Thus, one can say ‘he only left a minute ago’, but you can’t as easily say ‘*when only did he leave?’ because this would require two focus slots in the sentence, one for the WH question word ‘when’ and another for the focus adverb ‘only’. By these ‘intervention effects’, Miyagawa demonstrates how focus functions as a key grammatical feature, and is not merely an overlay added to ‘autonomous’ syntax taken narrowly. Miyagawa in fact uses hundreds of syntactic examples from a reasonably broad areal spectrum, looking mostly at English, Italian, and Japanese, but also exploring seemingly agreement-less languages like Mandarin as well as a couple of agreement-ful Bantu languages, Kikuyu and Kilega. In all cases, Miyagawa argues that the expressiveness of human speech is dependent on transformations triggered by abstract information-structure roles. By hypothesis, these roles appear in every human language, at least at some level and in some form. So it is important to take informational structure into account if one has any hope of discerning how diverse human languages can be unified in a single syntactic theory.
I must admit I liked the book despite not caring much for its rather anemic idea of information structure. Doing functional syntax with only topic and focus is not unlike trying to do syntax with just nouns and verbs. Although it sounds like the bane of minimalism, languages do in fact vary, as Miyagawa admits when casting doubt on the possibility that Strong Uniformity can be found. But Miyagawa is on the right track in searching for ways to connect pragmatics to narrow syntax. We need to move beyond the hope of finding a single feature in focus or a single projection in alpha-phrases. Beyond grammar and beyond logic lies a realm of rhetoric that Miyagawa’s findings only brush up against. We know from Western rhetoric that there is no uniform mapping between figure of speech and rhetorical effect. The same construction can have a different effect when used in a different context. Without describing recurring ideas like ‘expressiveness’, there’s not much information structure can tell us. Information structure moreover fails to yield up an understanding of the emotional dimension of discourse, a dimension inherent to using language in unusual ways, in marked and expressive ways. What I am suggesting is that we may not be able to generate these delightfully odd expressions without some sense of the emotional mind-set of all participants in a discourse. And to say that pragmatically marked forms say ‘the same thing’ logically perhaps doesn’t say nearly enough. When considering how language is used rhetorically in the presence of cultural complexity (to ask, to persuade, to curse, to lie, to beg, to kid, to order, to capitulate, to apologize, etc.) we begin to see how truly minimal minimalism is.
Shifting to the rhetorical field of minimalist syntax itself, Miyagawa provides Saint Noam’s theory with an ‘escape hatch’ that allows a minimum of pragmatic ‘information’ to leak into the grammar. This I feel is the next step for syntax: to understand the relationship between voluntary movements and the rhetorical dimension of speech in its human context. A less constrained theory might be less limited and thus have the power necessary to make known how languages, in their economical uniqueness, allow the saying of different things and not just the saying of the same things differently. This larger rhetorical world maybe seems frightening to minimalists. But linguistics cannot afford to bracket off ‘use’ in the pursuit of a sanitized ‘structure’. To continue to do so would lead to a new Bloomfieldian fear of the brain-mind in all its psychological reality. In sum, syntax has bigger problems than crossing lines in a tree (as in Latin) or universal features that don’t show up anywhere (as in Mandarin). Mainstream syntax needs above all else to allow languages to differ to the extent required by an honest analysis of the facts. As anthropology learned long ago, you can be different and equal at the same time. If minimalism is a search for universal principles of formal identity, and if it is also a quest for a universal inventory of categories, features, and relations, then I fear minimalism has already lost its object. ‘As needed’ +/-focus, voluntary movement, and alpha-phrases notwithstanding, Miyagawa does not do nearly enough to expand the pragmatic horizons of minimalism. But Why Agree? Why Move? is a good start.
Miyagawa’s Why Agree? Why Move? delves into some syntactic territory only recently explored by the topographical scions of minimalism. In fact, Miyagawa goes beyond the ‘narrow syntax’ dogmatism of Saint Noam and writes about syntax as something other than an autonomous system which is free from contamination by extra-grammatical content or context. By doing so, Miyagawa impressively puts Focus in focus and makes Topic a topic, exploring informational motivations for agreement and movement phenomena found in the syntax of every language. Wildly innovative yet formally constrained, Miyagawa breaks down the artificial barriers which segregate autonomous syntax from the critically important pragmatic, cognitive, and typological modes of linguistic explanation. By expanding minimalism in this still constrained way, that is by expanding minimalism minimally, Miyagawa claims to find the reasons why speakers and their sentences behave in the ways that they frequently do. Why Agree? Why Move? is still a highly syntactocentric exposition, despite Miyagawa’s taking into consideration information factors influencing grammatical behavior (topic/comment, (in)definiteness, focus, clause typing, etc.). These pragmatically induced grammatical behaviors are frequently bracketed off from mainstream syntax as annoyingly mysterious if not downright irrelevant to the discussion. But Miyagawa bravely and honestly looks closely at information structure, finding the topic/focus feature to be manifest in all languages, whether a language has rich agreement like Latin or seemingly no agreement like Mandarin.
As a quick example of information structure in action, consider content questions, which are marked in English syntax by moving a WH word to the beginning of the clause. While not all languages front question words (Mandarin doesn’t), it is nevertheless clear that such movement is motivated by the tendency for focused elements to occur near the beginning of a clause. Miyagawa’s analyses seem to justify his claim that this fronting, together with other pragmatically inspired movements, can add ‘expressiveness’ to any expression. Thus, one can say ‘he only left a minute ago’, but you can’t as easily say ‘*when only did he leave?’ because this would require two focus slots in the sentence, one for the WH question word ‘when’ and another for the focus adverb ‘only’. By these ‘intervention effects’, Miyagawa demonstrates how focus functions as a key grammatical feature, and is not merely an overlay added to ‘autonomous’ syntax taken narrowly. Miyagawa in fact uses hundreds of syntactic examples from a reasonably broad areal spectrum, looking mostly at English, Italian, and Japanese, but also exploring seemingly agreement-less languages like Mandarin as well as a couple of agreement-ful Bantu languages, Kikuyu and Kilega. In all cases, Miyagawa argues that the expressiveness of human speech is dependent on transformations triggered by abstract information-structure roles. By hypothesis, these roles appear in every human language, at least at some level and in some form. So it is important to take informational structure into account if one has any hope of discerning how diverse human languages can be unified in a single syntactic theory.
I must admit I liked the book despite not caring much for its rather anemic idea of information structure. Doing functional syntax with only topic and focus is not unlike trying to do syntax with just nouns and verbs. Although it sounds like the bane of minimalism, languages do in fact vary, as Miyagawa admits when casting doubt on the possibility that Strong Uniformity can be found. But Miyagawa is on the right track in searching for ways to connect pragmatics to narrow syntax. We need to move beyond the hope of finding a single feature in focus or a single projection in alpha-phrases. Beyond grammar and beyond logic lies a realm of rhetoric that Miyagawa’s findings only brush up against. We know from Western rhetoric that there is no uniform mapping between figure of speech and rhetorical effect. The same construction can have a different effect when used in a different context. Without describing recurring ideas like ‘expressiveness’, there’s not much information structure can tell us. Information structure moreover fails to yield up an understanding of the emotional dimension of discourse, a dimension inherent to using language in unusual ways, in marked and expressive ways. What I am suggesting is that we may not be able to generate these delightfully odd expressions without some sense of the emotional mind-set of all participants in a discourse. And to say that pragmatically marked forms say ‘the same thing’ logically perhaps doesn’t say nearly enough. When considering how language is used rhetorically in the presence of cultural complexity (to ask, to persuade, to curse, to lie, to beg, to kid, to order, to capitulate, to apologize, etc.) we begin to see how truly minimal minimalism is.
Shifting to the rhetorical field of minimalist syntax itself, Miyagawa provides Saint Noam’s theory with an ‘escape hatch’ that allows a minimum of pragmatic ‘information’ to leak into the grammar. This I feel is the next step for syntax: to understand the relationship between voluntary movements and the rhetorical dimension of speech in its human context. A less constrained theory might be less limited and thus have the power necessary to make known how languages, in their economical uniqueness, allow the saying of different things and not just the saying of the same things differently. This larger rhetorical world maybe seems frightening to minimalists. But linguistics cannot afford to bracket off ‘use’ in the pursuit of a sanitized ‘structure’. To continue to do so would lead to a new Bloomfieldian fear of the brain-mind in all its psychological reality. In sum, syntax has bigger problems than crossing lines in a tree (as in Latin) or universal features that don’t show up anywhere (as in Mandarin). Mainstream syntax needs above all else to allow languages to differ to the extent required by an honest analysis of the facts. As anthropology learned long ago, you can be different and equal at the same time. If minimalism is a search for universal principles of formal identity, and if it is also a quest for a universal inventory of categories, features, and relations, then I fear minimalism has already lost its object. ‘As needed’ +/-focus, voluntary movement, and alpha-phrases notwithstanding, Miyagawa does not do nearly enough to expand the pragmatic horizons of minimalism. But Why Agree? Why Move? is a good start.
December 14, 2012
An excellent, clearly written, theoretical monograph. Proposing a Topic/Focus projection to integrate strict word order languages with discourse configurational languages is something that has been necessary for a long time. Miyagawa's idea, though reliant on syntactic objects like uninterpretable features and feature inheritance, seems potentially interpretable through the front-end processing style approach of discourse theory.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews